Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction by Jim Downs published by Oxford University Press (2012) Hardcover $33.95, Paper $23.95, Kindle $9.99.
The Civil War unleashed a massive flow of black escaping from enslavement on plantations to hoped-for sanctuary with the advancing Union armies. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans participated in this exodus from slavery that was often accomplished by walking just a few miles. The fact that this refugee crisis was not even anticipated by the Union leadership at the start of the war led to unbelievable suffering for the refugees.
Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction is a groundbreaking work that describes the human toll of this terrible negligence on the part of the Federal government. Black refugees came in trickles at first, but soon in floods, to Union armies moving through the Confederacy. While some commanders treated the escaped slaves with compassion, others allowed them to starve and die. Even some anti-slavery officers favored a do-nothing policy towards the blacks at their moment of dire need in order to demonstrate that emancipation need not cost taxpayers money. Others insisted that letting children die from hunger would teach black parents the importance of work. Sick from Freedom is a book with few heroes and much suffering that expands our understanding of freedpeople’s experiences from the moment of emancipation into the first phase of Reconstruction.
Downs begins his book by explaining why most of us have not heard of the illness and death that decimated African Americans as they became free from bondage. He writes: Military officials, federal authorities, Northern journalists, and even their main allies, abolitionists, did not classify freed slaves as casualties or count them among the soldiers who died, but defined them as “fugitives,” “contraband,” “refugees,” and ultimately as “freedmen.” Casualties referred only to white soldiers, whose deaths, as horrific and unfortunate as they were, were described as the ultimate sacrifice for a greater political cause. Their demise, in turn, became commemorated as part of a larger cultural discourse known as the “good death.”
Displaced blacks dying from exposure or malnutrition did not fit into this category.
The dislocations of war meant that many blacks began to suffer nutritionally long before Sherman’s soldiers reached their neighborhoods. As Union regiments marched into epidemiologically isolated communities, they carried with them diseases plantation slaves may not have encountered before. Just as when new recruits were sent to training camps in 1861 and fell sick with diseases, so too did African Americans in the vicinity of soldiers in 1864 and 1865. Escaped slaves who fled to Union lines and were put into poorly supplied and maintained “contraband camps” suffered even more from the spread of contagious diseases.
Downs says that the “Civil War…produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century.” While many of those affected were soldiers, Downs writes that “Disease and sickness had a more devastating and fatal effects on emancipated slaves than on soldiers, since ex-slaves often lacked the basic necessities to survive. Emancipation liberated bondspeople from slavery, but they often lacked clean clothing, adequate shelter, proper food, and access to medicine in their escape toward Union lines.”
When members of Congress and the president considered the possibility that the war would lead to emancipation, they discussed it in terms of the economic, legal, political, and social consequences—paying very little, if any, attention to the human consequences of emancipation. Where were slaves to live? How would they find adequate food or clean drinking water? What would happen if they became sick or injured? Thus, when former slaves began to escape from plantations across the Confederate South and came into direct contact with Union military officials, the human reality of emancipation shocked federal leaders.
The process of escaping from slavery itself could be deadly. Slaves who heard that the Union army was moving through their state often left their plantations with little more than the clothes on their back. They then, as Downs points out, ran towards the war. They might spend days or weeks travelling through the destroyed landscape of a war zone seeking the Union army. The necessity of avoiding Confederate troops meant that they had to travel off the roads and away from possible food supplies. It also meant that they arrived in Union lines sometimes covered in ticks and other parasites picked up in the bushes or swamps.
During the first year after the Emancipation Proclamation, there was very little Federal provision made to care for the black refugees. Many commanders used discarded army supplies for the freedpeople, such as old uniforms, but since as many as half of the escapees were women and children, they often had nothing appropriate to clothe them with.
The primary way that support was provided to the freedmen was through employing them for wages on military work. Since only men were employed on most projects, women without husbands were left in a pitiable condition. For those women with husbands, their husbands’ decisions to enlist in the USCT could have bad consequences for their families. Unlike most white women whose husbands were soldiers and received support from local and state sources, the black women lived in the Confederacy and could expect no aid from any governmental source other than the Feds. They often found themselves in “contraband camps” cut off from their extended families. The fact that the husbands of black women were paid less for their service as soldiers meant that these resourceless families would have to live on even less.
White abolitionists, who had been thinking of black freedom for years, appear to have not reached any consensus on how blacks were to survive during the period between breaking the chains of bondage and the end of the war. Downs writes that the abolitionists failed to imagine the danger to the very survival of thousands of blacks that sudden escape to Union lines would bring. They had, he says:
failed to consider how this process would unfold. Some abolitionists claimed that if freed, those of African descent should be sent back to Africa, while others embraced the idea that slaves should be able to pursue free lives in the United States as had occurred with the gradual manumission laws in the early nineteenth-century North. Either scenario, however, failed to consider the day-to-day reality of how emancipation would unfold. Where would ex-slaves go, for example, while they waited to be transported to Africa? What would they eat and where would they live as they searched for employment and new homes after being freed from chattel slavery?
The abolitionists were lulled into thinking that the relatively easy transition to freedom that Blacks in the North had experienced would be repeated in the South, even though the numbers and the underlying conditions were completely different.
While the abolitionists lacked the foresight to see the crisis that would develop, when they received reports of the deaths of escapees they were among the first to respond. They brought material aid to those in the contraband camps and, more importantly, they brought publicity and advocacy. When a Union general expelled black women and children from Camp Nelsen in Kentucky leading to a large number of deaths of African Americans, for example, the abolitionist network helped reopen and reform this camp serving the families of USCT.
Downs gives an eye-opening account of the dire situation that many of the 500,000 African Americans who fled slavery experienced. While some of the pain was caused by the same optimism for a Union victory that resulted in military disasters early in the war, by 1864 the Lincoln administration should have learned from its failures of the previous year. Republican Free Labor doctrine and the broad anti-black racism of military commanders, white doctors, and politicians only compounded the degradation the former slaves experienced.
Lest the reader think that this disaster ended with the end of the war, many of the mistakes made with blacks were reproduced a decade later in Federal efforts to “aid” relocated Native Americans. Downs devotes a chapter to this story.
This book covers ground in great detail that is only discussed in a few pages in other books on Emancipation and Reconstruction. I found every chapter enlightening in the saddest possible way.
Sick from Freedom is well worth reading for anyone interested in the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American history, and comparative refugee policy studies.
